Newcastle, 5am: the tired and weary take the bus south to fight the cuts

A masked Ebou Cope and his mother, Vanessa, on the coach down from Newcastle to the London march. Photograph: Mark Pinder for the Observer

The first thing to note about getting from Newcastle to London is the obvious one: it's a long way. No wonder it took the Jarrow marchers 22 days. Fortunately, the Coalition of Resistance (Tyne and Wear section) has arranged coaches (£25 waged, £10 unwaged). But still.

At 5.15am at Newcastle Central station, where the last stag-nighters are still trying to remember which hotel they checked into, the marchers are mustering, blinking themselves awake and attempting to summon appropriate levels of solidarity. A banner is unfurled displaying the coalition's logo: a huge pair of scissors and a little pale paper chain of workers and families. Huddled together in the misty morning Geordie light, the symbolism feels about right.

As soon as you talk to the assembled protesters, though, the vulnerability gives way to a shared sense of determined expectation. In contrast with single-issue protests of the past, almost everyone seems to have come for a different reason. Many are first-time marchers; some have never been to London.

Jenny Cavenagh and Val Schollar are representing the Newcastle Tenants' Association. They are here in the half-light because they fear that their homes are no longer secure. Cavenagh's mother was a council tenant in Newcastle in the same property for 56 years; on her death she took it over, but she fears that changes to tenancy laws will put her on the street. "It's not privatisation through the back door, even," she says, clutching her banner. "It's just a ram raid, really."

Roberta Stewart had to come because of anxieties about the care allowance she gets for her younger daughter, who has Asperger's syndrome. "No one knows what will happen yet, but like everyone else up here, we fear the worst."

Her eldest daughter, Annalisa, nods her head in hungover agreement after one hour's sleep. Few of those waiting for the coaches know each other. There is a mix of ages: more women than men. Museum administrators fearing cuts to the culture budget are introducing themselves to already unemployed social workers; veterans of the poll tax protests and miners' strikes are swapping stories with sixth-form students.

There is a smattering of full-time artists: Lauren Healey, representing AIR (Artists' Interaction and Representation), is clutching a rolled banner. "It says: 'Political ideology is not necessity'," she says, slightly uncertainly. "I wasn't aiming for anything too catchy …"

The Coalition of Resistance in Newcastle was formed in response to the letter that Tony Benn and 73 others wrote to the Guardian protesting at the cuts. Tony Dowling, a specialist behaviour support teacher in Gateshead, read that letter and helped to convene a meeting at the Bridge hotel on the banks of the Tyne. He had no idea who would turn up. A few were familiar faces from other meetings, union members and Stop the War comrades, but many more were unfamiliar.

Though a long-time National Union of Teachers activist, Dowling had the sense that the union was no longer going to be sufficient on its own. Since the collapse of industry in this area in the 1980s, employment, where it existed, was fragmentary, no longer one-size-fits-all. "We wanted," Dowling recalls, "something that could belong to everybody."

Slowly the numbers have grown, as anxieties have spread. They had imagined they would put on one coach to London; in the event they have four, including one leaving from Hexham in Northumberland, which has a school samba band on board. Since the day of action was announced, there has been a new mood in the group; some people talk somewhat vaguely about Tunisia and Egypt; mass protest is in the air.

Students who were involved in last year's demonstrations have been looking for a broader outlet for their anger at what they see as a betrayal of their generation. Lizi Gray, a lower-sixth student in Gateshead, is now on the steering committee of the coalition. She was partly radicalised, she suggests, by attending the flagship academy Emmanuel school, with its controversial creationist leanings. "It was just extremely weird there," she recalls.

She and a few friends in the north-east were both excited and frustrated by the student marches last year. "For the first one, out of 200 people at our sixth-form college, only about 20 were in school the day of the march. But after that, the numbers dwindled until by the end only four or five were on the demos."

Those four or five have now helped to form what she calls the North East Schools and Colleges Union. Gray sits at the front of the bus reading Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, and talking about the abolition of the education maintenance allowance and the cutting of youth services. "We are getting to the point where there is going to be nothing at all left for the young up here," she says. "No jobs, no way of affording university, no help and nowhere to go."

Once the coach is under way – only 300 miles to go – Sean Sedden, another sixth former, is sticking up "No cuts, no fees, no sackings, let the bankers pay" posters on the windows. Like the handful of other teenagers on board, he takes some inspiration from the "creative protests" of UK Uncut and Space Hijackers. Sedden and some mates have attempted a few copycat raids against tax-avoiding companies like Vodafone and Topshop; he is looking forward to linking up with the metropolitan originals. "In London you might get hundreds of people," he says. "In Newcastle so far it's really the same seven people in Philip Green masks." One friend was recently arrested for obstruction as well, so that "has put the lid on it for the time being".

Older stagers, like the white-bearded John Tinmouth, who arrives clutching Frances Stonor Saunders's book about the CIA funding of the arts, are invigorated by the presence of the younger arrivals. Tinmouth's not had a great start to the day, mind. A blog he'd written last week about Palestine seems to have attracted the wrong kind of interest. He's woken up to find the word "Nonce" scrawled on his kitchen window.

The closer we get to London, the more awake the coach becomes. Ebou Cope, aged eight, the youngest on board, is trying on his David Cameron mask and proudly examining his homemade pirate placard. The Jarrow marchers amused themselves with singing Annie Laurie and Cheer, Boys, Cheer to the strains of a mouth-organ. Seventy-five years on, the musical accompaniment to this crusade is, like the politics, far more individual and fragmentary. Many have settled into their iPods. A few are tweeting progress and picking up news of comrades on other coaches; a cohort from Aberdeen set off at 2am apparently; more hardcore Newcastle splinter groups are already at Trafalgar Square, someone announces in admiration.

Some sentiments unite everyone aboard. At one point, from the back of the coach – from a trio of teenagers who plan to march under a Woodcraft banner – there is a spirited chorus of the rapper NxtGen's YouTube tirade against Andrew Lansley and the NHS cuts. "Andrew Lansley greedy! Andrew Lansley tosser!", and though she might not express it in quite those terms, it is music to the ears of Diane Attersall, a staff nurse for more than 30 years, who has reluctantly taken early retirement from an NHS she fears she will soon no longer recognise.

There are around 325,000 public sector workers in the north-east. Some estimates suggest more than 10% will lose their jobs in the cuts; the average worker earns less than £20,000. If there is an animating emotion on the coach, beside general anger about that future, it is the sense most people are here to show that they care about that. People like Vanessa Cope, a youth worker at Barnardo's who is waiting to see the effects of a £5m cut to the north-east regional budget; or like Dean Huggins, a community worker in Sunderland who co-ordinates 16 organisations that encourage enterprise and employment among minorities, and who has just – ironically – had to lay off his four-man team.

By the time we reach the M25 at noon, it's hard not to be persuaded by the idea that several people on the coach have proposed: that if you really wanted to build a big society, a good place to begin might be listening to the anxieties of people who are prepared to get up at 4am to defend their communities.